"Slackware 14.0 brings many updates and enhancements, among which you'll find two of the most advanced desktop environments available today: Xfce 4.10.0, a fast and lightweight but visually appealing and easy to use desktop environment, and KDE 4.8.5, a recent stable release of the 4.8.x series of the award-winning KDE desktop environment. [...] Slackware uses the 3.2.29 kernel bringing you advanced performance features such as journaling filesystems, SCSI and ATA RAID volume support, SATA support, Software RAID, LVM (the Logical Volume Manager), and encrypted filesystems. Kernel support for X DRI (the Direct Rendering Interface) brings high-speed hardware accelerated 3D graphics to Linux."

I'm going to chime in a say that Slackware was my second distribution. (The first was Mandrake) It's was the first one I was able to get working fully. There was a nice installation on LinuxQuestions that got me started.

My only problem with it was the limits on which software I could find for it. That meant that sometime I had to compile and several times that didn't work. But looking back I remember most of the time that was software that I was experimenting with.

It was a lot less annoying than many others out there with their packaging system. It was also much less buggy than many of the others. (So was Mandrake if my memory serves)